Synthi-based improv that squeaks when you cook it, on the generally outstanding Polish imprint Musica Genera, made by a trio of players hemorrhaging more ideas per second than the grand total of their elder statesmen's years. Lehn's redoubtable synth manhandling recontextualizes Keith Emerson for the digital bruit age, obviously forsaking "melody" for areas simultaneously arcane and atonal. Spanish free percussionist Zach shifts between silences and self-actualization, his hands metamorphosing into human drumsticks when necessary, striking objects of unknown origin with either the requisite bluster or calculatedly measured restraint. And Grydeland? A new man on the scene, trading guitar and banjo (!) licks with Lehn as if he's known the synthesist since birth — both men bleed their instrument's power of finesse dry, denying both tautness of string and pressure-resistant plastic of key.
Recorded at Teater Kana at the Musica Genera Festival in Szczecin, Poland on May 28th, 2005, anagrammatic nonsense lifted from the recording's geographic origin (and font-broken all over the disc's blue-grid surface) speak volumes about the interplay emanating therein. Zach tumbles about "Zecin" like a kid in a reverberating sandbox, rubbing cymbal casings, fondling shards of jangling ribbons, scattering rubbish on his drum skins and sweeping off the sounds with a flick of the wrist. Meanwhile Lehn launches an odd fillip or malfunctioning thruster splurt; occasionally he succumbs to the urge for "normalcy" by maintaining a forward motion of sounds for more than three seconds, but a rarity this is. Grydeland spits and shivers, comfortable with merely running rivulets of banjo through his fingers or monotoning guitar tautologies a la Akiyama or Rowe. As haphazard as these conflagration of sounds are, they're nonetheless fascinating to behold — hairpin, ricocheting, often colliding, it's all a big bang, an improv physics class untethered from musical reality.
That "reality" at least appears superficially reclaimed on "Szcin," where the players jettison skronk for surface noise dappling, reveling in atmospheric disturbances. Nevertheless, adventure quickly rules the roost: Zach inaugurates a gnarled carpet of cymbal hiss that bears more than a hint of the synthetic; meanwhile Lehn culls low-end electronic gerbils out of their nests to scamper ever-so-freely. Strangely affecting, this alien tableau sees the trio joyously trapped in an interspatial sink they harmoniously ease in to, cool, calm, and most collected. Onlookers to this event must have been agape at the textures materializing before their eyes; the finale, "Szczec," anticlimactic to a degree, makes polarizing use of high-pitched synth, twisted guitar skree, and Zach's feathery-light touch, but it's Lehn who's the star here, emitting gruff sci-fi blipstreams and macrocosmic waveform bursts. His keyboard is the laminate binding the three together, lifting this particular happening outside known space and well into the outer limits.
Comments and Feedback:
|
